SCHOOLS NEED TO TEACH A FOURTH R: RESPECT

Nina Burleigh, a journalist in Washington, D.CCHICAGO TRIBUNE

Fifteen years ago, I walked up to the podium of a large suburban gymnasium to accept a scholastic achievement award. It was the last week of my senior year in high school, and the entire school had gathered to send us off at an assembly.

As the principal shook my hand and handed me a certificate, he whispered in my ear what probably looked like congratulations. He said: "How's that guy of yours?"

The guy was my boyfriend, a star football player and a popular young man.

At the time, the incident didn't upset me or seem in any way out of the ordinary. It didn't signify anything about the big wide world I was stepping into. The principal didn't know me well. Football players at our school were heroes, and girls with good grades were common as grass.

In the intervening years I've remembered this incident and in re-telling it, I've imbued it with more meaning than I thought it had at the time. I'm telling it again because I thought about it when the subject of sexual harassment among teenagers made the news in recent months.

This spring, the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women and the National Organization for Women Legal Defense and Education Fund released a survey that found 39 percent of 4,200 girls responding to a survey said they experienced sexual harassment every school day. About half said their schools had not reacted to reports of harassment.

The harassment crosses race and class lines. In New York this summer, girls at inner-city pools are being subjected to a form of boyish frolic that the police are calling sexual abuse. It's a game called "whirlpool," in which a group of boys circle a girl, link arms and start groping her. Some of the girls have had their suits ripped off.

At a suburban high school outside Washington, teenage girls recently reported they were routinely called "bitches" and "whores" as they walked down hallways. Lewd gestures and a Tailhook-style gantlet where boys fondled them in stairwells or along lockers were part of the daily routine. At the same school, male gym teachers decorate their offices with porno centerfolds while boys tape the same pictures inside their lockers.

If these were race-based incidents, school boards would be convening and heads would be rolling. But because the perpetrators are just boys and the victims just girls, administrators for the most part wink. Despite the increased attention paid to women's rights in the workplace, in colleges and by government, a critical period in women's lives is overlooked.

Children learn early that girls are devalued once they become women. As Simone de Beauvoir pointed out in the 1950s, even 5-year-olds learn sexism in the differences between mothers' lives and fathers' lives. Now, whatever parents may do to provide an egalitarian effect, children get stereotypical images of women and men on television, especially in advertising and on MTV, where videos consistently portray women as intrinsically seductive creatures, if not outright nymphomaniacs.

No wonder then that peer pressure kicks in and schools turn into laboratories for the misogyny that pervades the culture.

Girls learn more in school than the higher ideals of public education intend them to. They learn to accept behaviors that among adults now are illegal. More than that, they learn to expect to be treated like second-class citizens, objects of prurient interest and in extreme cases, victims.

Women's organizations have started to address the problem. The American Association of University Women has developed workshops to help teachers and students understand what sexual harassment is and how to deal with it. The NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund has suggested students team up with supportive teachers to change the atmosphere of harassment.

More efforts should be made to address the issue of respect for women. Gender relationships should be taught to boys and girls at the elementary school level alongside science and civics.

I realize eductors can't change society. But it took me almost 10 years to realize that in his final words to me, the principal put the finishing touch on a lesson I took away from my school years: that women are not terribly important in the grand scheme of things.

Self-respect after those years was a hard-won prize of personal education. It's a shame that a new generation of girls is coming of age still fighting to learn the same lesson on their own in hostile circumstances.